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Monday, March 02, 2009

It's Getting Verse And Verse!

The discussion in the Dennett thread continues--Phunicular is a phenom, and Thoughts is thoughtful (if wrong).

Phinicular is archiving his own comments, or I would post several here; they are wonderful. I'll just post my latest comment as an appetizer here:

The nature of your question presupposes your position;The “phenomenal” you’re after is an artifact of word;Descartes approached the problem in a dualist tradition—With the progress of neurology, that view is now absurd.A photon is reflected from a stimulus that’s distal;Through the pupil, lens, and humors to the retina it goes,Where a rod or cone transduces it, to fire like a pistolTo bipolar cells and ganglia, as everybody knows.At the level of the retina, already there are featuresWhich are processed by the structures that we call the visual fields;Light is processed very differently by different sorts of creaturesSo that information useful to their situation yields.Now a signal (or “potential”) shoots along the optic neuronThen through processing in parallel in many different waysSuch as color, edges, faces, on and on and more obscure on—Read some Sacks or Ramachandran if you can, one of these days.From occipital to temporal, and on up to the frontalBack and forth, with constant feedback, now the signal makes its wayWith perhaps a verbal output, though the answer that you want’llStill elude you, cos you’re looking for a view that’s had its day.The majority of processing is out of our awareness(And “the feeling of awareness” has its processing as well!)We cannot feel the process, just results, and so in fairnessIntrospection as a method simply doesn’t work that well.At no point in the process is “an image” there for viewing,Nor a “self” to view the image, which is really no surprise;To demand an explanation for what you think we are doingIs equivalent to asking how the sun can truly rise!A perceptual illusion doesn’t mean that something’s missing—What it means is merely something isn’t what it seemed at firstThere’s no need to be Cartesian now, unless we’re reminiscing,And there’s nothing there but trouble in the bubble we have burst.